Only in an Almodovar movie can life be so absurd, tragic, comic and wonderful at the same time. Live Flesh has elements of satirical comedy, kitsch thriller and idiosyncratic slice-of-life observation. It is supposed to have been based on a novel by Ruth Rendell, but then you'd never guess from this full-blooded handling of the story with its romping sweaty bodies and bizarre twists of fate.

The absurdly comic opening scene sets the tone: a mother is forced to give birth to a baby on a night bus in Madrid. The loquacious landlady, who is taking the pregnant woman to hospital, ends up biting off the umbilical cord and ties it together with the bus driver's shoelaces. The comedy continues in an absurd, satirical vein, although always tinged with a deeper sense of pain, guilt and bad fortune.

While the characters in Live Flesh, are a colourful, down-to-earth bunch they are all in some way tragic: we have a junkie-turned-childcare worker, an alcoholic cop who beats his wife "because he loves her", a supremely unlucky young man tortured by the woman he lost his virginity to and, best of all, a wheelchair basketball champion, who Almodovar gives the full sports hero treatment, complete with slo-mo.

The team of wheelchair basketball players zip around, dribble and shoot with great prowess. It's so well done you find yourself wondering if the Nike training shoes on the star's flacid legs are actually a product placement.

The film is packed with incident (adultery, violence, love triangles, guilt, intrigue, naked romps), but the plot is woven tightly. Perhaps too tightly. Everything is too conveniently connected. Life does have many surprising coincidences, but this hits the outer reaches of probability. It's almost as if Almodovar is worried that his characters will wilt if he doesn't thrust them into another crazy situation. Absurdity piles upon absurdity. This could be a complaint, or you can accept that this is an Almodovar movie and relish the experience of watching it.